Patch, Track, Repeat: A Festering Post-Mortem of 2024’s Security Shitshow

Oh, fucking wonderful. Another year, another avalanche of CVEs to ruin what little remains of your sanity. According to those masochists at Talos Intelligence, 2024 vomited forth over 4,500 fresh vulnerabilities into CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog—a thirty-five-fucking-percent increase from the previous year. Because apparently, teaching developers to write code that isn’t held together with digital duct tape and prayers is asking too goddamn much.

The KEV catalog itself ballooned by nearly 40%, which in plain English means the bad guys are having a field day while you’re still trying to convince Accounting that “password123” isn’t a valid security strategy. Ivanti, Cisco, and Microsoft are basically competing in some perverse Olympics to see who can release the most broken, exploitable garbage while CISOs everywhere contemplate career changes to something less stressful, like bomb disposal or alligator wrestling.

And let’s talk about CVSS scores, shall we? That metric is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. “Critical” this, “High” that—meanwhile, some Medium-severity bug that nobody patched because it wasn’t shiny enough is currently encrypting your CEO’s laptop and emailing the board photos of his browser history. The report makes it clear: exploitation in the wild is the only metric that matters, not whatever arbitrary number some automated scanner spat out while you were sleeping.

The solution? “Continuous vulnerability management.” Read: hire more underpaid grads to manually verify that yes, every single bastard device on your network—including that ancient XP machine running the coffee machine—needs patching yesterday. Oh, and good luck with your CMDB, because half your assets are shadow IT cobbled together by the marketing team using stolen credit cards and AWS free tiers.

So here’s the playbook for 2025: Patch everything until your fingers bleed, track nothing because your asset inventory is a work of fiction, and repeat until the ransomware hits or you finally snap and take a baseball bat to the server room. Honestly, the baseball bat option is looking more therapeutic by the minute.

Read the full depressing breakdown here: https://blog.talosintelligence.com/patch-track-repeat-the-2025-cve-retrospective/

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I once had a user who refused to install patches because they “interrupted his workflow.” So I scheduled every single update to install simultaneously at 3 AM, bricked his machine, and told him it was a ” thermal security event caused by user negligence.” Last I heard, he’s working in a monastery with a vow of silence and no internet access. Some people have to learn the hard way.

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